Faux fiscal conservative Ald. Frank Wsol (7th Ward) continues to lead the fight to keep Park Ridge water usage rates artificially (and irresponsibly) low by refusing to pass through to water users the full cost the City pays for the water it buys from the City of Chicago.  Wsol wants property taxpayers to continue subsidizing water users, an unsound policy even if judged solely (no pun intended) on economic grounds.

But where it becomes borderline insane is when you actually realize who are the primary beneficiaries of this manipulation of water economics: the City’s Top Ten biggest water users [pdf].

Which means that under Wsol’s subsidy plan, all you senior citizens, all you middle-aged empty nesters, all you single-person households, and all you water conservationists continue to pay a portion of your property taxes so that Lutheran General Hospital, the Park Ridge Park District, School Districts 207 and 64, and Resurrection Nursing Home don’t have to pay the full cost of all the water they use. 

And guess what’s even worse, folks?  Those five entities don’t pay property taxes!

At this past Monday night’s City Council meeting, Wsol smugly questioned whether any previous City Council (including the ones that Wsol has been sitting on since 2005 and which have produced deficit budgets every year except one) “[has] voted on how much of a surplus we should accumulate in the water fund of taxpayer money?” – knowing full well it had not. 

But even if that’s the case, so what, Frankie? 

That question is about as worthless as Ald. Robert Ryan’s customary “What do other municipalities do?” whenever he’s confronted by an issue which brings that quizzical-to-blank expression to his face signaling the same condition as the flashing “vacancy” sign in front of a cheap motel.  Let’s get this straight once and for all: what other municipalities’ collections of plodding bureaucrats and rubber-stamp elected officials do has yet to be proved the “magic bullet” of fiscally-responsible municipal governance. 

While Wsol actually gets something right when he notes that the water fund, an “enterprise” fund which exists to provide a defined payment source for water, currently has an approximately $3 million surplus, that observation deserves another “So what?”  Suggesting that a water fund surplus provides a good reason for not charging water users the full cost of that water is an apples-to-oranges analysis, and one that’s intellectually dishonest to boot.

It also disregards the fact, as reported by former City Finance Director Diane Lembesis on a couple of occasions within the past year, that cash from the water fund has been needed to cover the City’s payroll, thereby saving the City from incurring the cost of having to borrow that money from outside sources.  So depleting the already-dwindling water fund surplus is bad management on yet another level.

Unfortunately, Wsol is not alone in this folly.  Ald. Don Bach (3rd Ward) is so clueless he actually attempted to justify his opposition to full-cost water rates by stating that he “would not like to see the average 65-year-old homeowner have to pay a couple more cents a gallon.”  Hey, Don…wake up!  That’s what’s already happening, except that your average 65-year-old homeowner is also helping pay for the water being used by the likes of Lutheran General, the Park Ridge Country Club, and even Dominick’s. 

At this point, only Mayor Dave Schmidt seems to “get it.”  And he’s not even entitled to vote on the budget, barring the unlikely event of a Council deadlock over its approval.

Try as we might, we can’t see even one good reason why all Park Ridge water users should not pay the full cost to the City of the water they use, or why anybody’s water usage should be subsidized by the City’s property taxpayers.  Such a policy is both penny and pound foolish, with not an ounce of wisdom to be found.

Maybe it’s because we live in the State of Corruption, County of Crook that when we see something as ridiculous as Wsol’s and Bach’s water subsidy, we find ourselves asking whether the motive behind it is stupid or just plain crooked.  

And, in this case, we also find ourselves asking: “Just whose water are you carrying, Ald. Wsol?”

Monday night the Park Ridge City Council ended its 7-month flirtation with billboards, at least for the time being, when Ald. Jim “Billboards” Allegretti led the effort to deprive Park Ridge residents of a final Council vote on whether or not to uphold the 9-0 decision of the City’s Planning & Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) against permitting billboards in Park Ridge.

After shamelessly serving as chief Council lackey for Joseph Loss’ Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”) in its effort to get permits for four billboards at Renaissance Office Plaza by using the City as its unofficial agent, Allegretti took the coward’s way out: with the help of Alds. Don Bach, Tom Carey and Robert Ryan, he successfully substituted his motion to withdraw the City’s zoning change application for the pending tactical motion of Ald. Joe Sweeney to overturn the P&Z ruling. 

Sweeney’s motion was “tactical” because it would have required a supermajority of six votes, something Sweeney’s and Ald. Rich DiPietro’s expected “no” votes would have prevented.   

What Allegretti has up his sleeve with this latest ploy isn’t immediately clear, but with a little luck we won’t have to watch City government waste further time and effort on a billboards proposal that, even if it had been approved by P&Z or the Council, likely could have generated only a tiny fraction of the revenues Allegretti (and GGI) were promising.
 
The upshot of all this? 

Seven months of wasted time and attention by the Council, City Staff and the public on an initiative that didn’t deserve to get off the ground – and probably wouldn’t have, if not for the votes of Ryan and Ald. Frank Wsol at the August 17, 2009, Council meeting in support of Allegretti’s motion to make the City, rather than GGI, the zoning change applicant. 

With Bach and Carey absent that night, Ryan’s and Wsol’s votes were all Allegretti needed to overcome the opposition of Sweeney and DiPietro.  And once that happened, the unproductive chain of events that followed was set in motion.

The minutes of the August 17 meeting (sanitized for your protection by the City Clerk, as usual) say only that Allegretti “believes this case was important enough to allow the Council to have the final word” that it wouldn’t get if GGI were the applicant and P&Z denied its application; and there’s no mention of Ryan or Wsol speaking on the motion before voting to approve it.

Try as we might, however, we can’t think of one good “public policy” reason why this case was so “important” that the City had to carry the water for GGI.  Or why the Council needed to have “the final word” on it.  

Although it’s easy to think of several kinky reasons why Allegretti so shamelessly pushed the GGI agenda, we have to wonder what Ryan and Wsol could have been thinking when they signed onto Allegretti’s special deal for GGI.
 
So we pose the following question for Messrs. Ryan and Wsol:  Why did you vote to make the City the appllicant for the zoning ordinance amendments to permit billboards, especially where doing so allowed GGI to avoid the disclosure requirements of the City’s ethics ordinance that are designed to combat kinky deals? 

Gentlemen, feel free to submit your explanation(s) as comments to this post – we promise to publish them.  

Meanwhile, since we don’t really expect Ryan or Wsol to take us up on our offer, we invite our rank-and-file readers to offer their own explanations.

For any of you who were foolish enough to have expected billboard advocate/faux fiscal conservative Frank DiFranco to actually show up at last Saturday’s (Jan. 16) City Council budget workshop for the purpose of learning something about City finances, he didn’t. 

Yawn.

But the more interesting question will be whether DiFranco, or his law partner and fellow billboard advocate/faux fiscal conservative Jeff Wilson, or Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”) attorney and consummate Park Ridge insider, Jack Owens, shows up at tonight’s City Council meeting, seeing as this might be GGI’s last stand.

That’s because City Attorney Everette M. “Buzz” Hill has now provided the Council with a formal opinion letter [pdf] stating that the “fee by agreement” GGI is offering the City appears to be unlawful and unenforceable either as an excessive impact or license fee (because it is disproportionate to the City’s cost of regulating the billboards), or as invalid “contract zoning.”  

And if that’s not bad enough for DiFranco and No. 1 billboards Alderlackey Jim Allegretti (4th Ward), Hill also has tendered an opinion letter [pdf] confirming Mayor Dave Schmidt’s ruling from the chair at the December 21, 2009, Council meeting that a supermajority of six votes will be needed for the Council to over-rule the decision of the Planning & Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) rejecting the City’s application for the zoning code text amendments necessary to permit the  billboards GGI seeks. 

As you may recall, the City – rather than GGI or the owner of the Renaissance office plaza property where the signs would go – became the applicant when Allegretti and Alds. Robert Ryan (5th Ward) and Frank Wsol (7th Ward) outvoted Alds. Joe Sweeney (1st Ward) and Rich DiPietro (2nd Ward) on that issue last summer.  So if a supermajority vote is required to trump P&Z’s decision, even the addition of Alds. Don Bach (3rd Ward) and Tom Carey (6th Ward) to the pro-billboards forces would not provide the six votes needed – assuming DiPietro and Ryan hang tough, and Mayor Schmidt keeps his word about voting “No.” 

But it could still be a lively discussion, given Allegretti’s mini-tirade at the December 21, 2009, Council meeting against the supermajority vote and the erroneous advice he claims to have received from the then-absent Hill.  As a result, the vote on the issue was deferred to tonight’s meeting. 

But if we’re lucky, when the smoke clears tonight we should be done with this ridiculous and malodorous billboard scheme that would be shameful, if only its proponents weren’t totally shameless.

And with this sideshow out of the way, the Council can start to focus on coming up with some real reforms to the way it has been mismanaging our tax dollars for the better part of the past decade.

As we noted in Wednesday’s post, tomorrow morning from 9:00 a.m. to noon the City Council will be holding its first “budget workshop” for the 2010-11 budget year. 

Although Mayor Dave Schmidt was instrumental in changing the customary “workshop” practice to permit citizen comment, if citizens don’t show up and speak their minds about how the City takes and spends our tax dollars we’re likely to get another year of business as usual – which, in the City’s case, means multi-million dollar deficits and insufficient funds to maintain the City’s infrastructure and essential services.

We can’t wait to see whether Frank DiFranco shows up to actually learn something about City finances to go with his simplistic, one-note “We need billboards” refrain.  If so, that would appear to be a first, as we don’t recall Frankie D ever publicly expressing any prior interest in the City’s finances, even as the City spent most of the past decade posting multi-million dollar operating deficits while at the same time depleting fund balances and running up more multi-millions in bonded debt. 

In fact, Frankie D’s only only involvement with City government our research disclosed is as a $2,100 contributor to Howard P. Frimark’s first mayoral campaign, and as the attorney defending Norwood Builders’ Bruce Adreani against charges he had a “Monica Lewinsky” moment with a temporary waitress in the Park Ridge Country Club’s men’s locker room in July 2007. 

But now he’s writing to the Herald-Advocate about how “[o]ur taxes are going up. City services are being cut. Police raises are not being paid even though the city was contractually obligated to pay them.”

Good points all, which is why it’s up to the average citizen to start letting it be known, in no uncertain terms, that the City’s business-as-usual financial mismanagement will no longer be tolerated. 

So will we see you at City Hall tomorrow morning, Franki D?

How about the rest of you Park Ridge taxpayers? 

The Park Ridge Herald-Advocate has just published its “wish list” for the City of Park Ridge (“Editorial: Greatest wish for 2010? Forget about past decade,” Jan. 11) that contains one “wish” we wholeheartedly endorse:

• aldermen educating themselves on municipal finance and the city’s budget situation. Since taking office nearly three years ago, more than one elected official has admitted to having limited knowledge of municipal finance. Such decision-making is one of the most important of aldermanic responsibilities and should be treated accordingly.

The H-A apparently didn’t believe its readers deserved to know the names of each of those elected officials who have admitted that they can’t (or just don’t want to do the work necessary to) figure out how City finances work to the extent necessary to cast an informed vote on budget matters.

But one of that hapless group is Ald. Robert Ryan (5th Ward), who admitted his fiscal ineptitude at the Council’s December 7, 2009, meeting.  Ryan’s solution to this particular shortcoming, however, wasn’t to promise to hit the books and educate himself, or to demand that City Staff provide financial reports and explanations that Ryan and everybody else, including the average resident, can understand.  Instead, he suggested the formation of another citizens task force – this time for the purpose of advising the Council on financial matters.

Brilliant!  Let appointed residents effectively make decisions for those public officials who were elected to make those decisions for us.

When Ryan – reportedly with the encouragement of then-mayor Howard Frimark – chose to run for alderman back in 2007, didn’t somebody tell him that perhaps his most important duties would be to guard the taxpayers’ hard-earned tax dollars and keep in check the often profligate spending of the bureaucrats who run City government on a day-to-day basis?  Or is it that he just didn’t care?

In contrast to Ryan, Third Ward Ald. Don Bach repeatedly has talked the talk about balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility.  Unfortunately for City residents, however, he has totally failed to walk the walk, as evidenced by his being one of the five aldermen (along with Alds. Allegretti, Ryan, Carey and Wsol) who voted to over-ride Mayor Schmidt’s historic veto last June of the Council’s giveaway of even more tax dollars to private community organizations run by folks not elected by or accountable to the taxpayers for those tax dollars. 

And although Bach has flapped his gums about drastic cuts in City personnel, he has offered little-to-nothing specific for Staff or the Council even to consider.  No surprise there.

Allegretti and Wsol wanted to hang about $1 million a year of extra debt service on the City to finance their new police station (thank you, Joe Egan, for your referendum that put the kibosh on that insanity), so we shouldn’t expect much fiscal responsibility from them – although it hasn’t escaped our sense of perverse humor that Wsol and Allegretti opposed the pass-through of water rate increases that would have netted the City approximately the same $400,000 of additional revenue – albeit for only one year – that Allegretti wants from his billboard deal (assuming that deal is even lawful, which the City Attorney disputes).   

This Saturday (Jan. 16) from 9:00 a.m. until noon, the City Council will be holding its first “budget workshop” for the 2010-11 fiscal year.  This session will be a crucial first step in a process that recently has produced million dollar-plus deficits that have put the City in an extremely precarious financial position. 

We understand that this year, unlike for past budget workshops, residents will be permitted and even encouraged to share their views about the budget and City finances.  That’s an encouraging change, instigated by Mayor Schmidt, although its practical value will depend on how many residents make the time and effort to show up, listen, and speak meaningfully to the issues.

But be forewarned: the spendthrift bureaucrats and elected officials who have proposed and presided over the recent deficit budgets and a good deal of indiscriminate spending will not embrace fiscal responsibility quietly or willingly.  In the past they relied on treating the taxpayers like mushrooms: keeping us in the dark and feeding us manure.

Now with the lights switched on (but with manure still at the ready), expect them to try to make this financial stuff sound as complicated and intractable as possible; and expect to hear about far more problems than solutions intended to discourage meaningful change and preserve the status quo with which they are all too comfortable. 

But if we fall for those tactics, we have only ourselves to blame.

Mayor Dave Schmidt has already talked about the need for the City to begin work on the 2010-11 budget.  He also has publicly vowed to veto a budget that isn’t balanced – or that is “balanced” by deceptive public fund accounting tricks.

So we noted with interest the report in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune that Naperville is trying to close an $11 million budget deficit this year by eliminating 49 jobs to save $3.6 million a year (“Naperville cuts 22 employees, won’t fill 27 vacant positions,” Jan. 9).  These latest cuts come on the heels of Naperville’s elimination of 43 other positions a year ago.

Park Ridge’s budget deficit for the current fiscal year is “only” a little over $2 million, but so far City government has only cut 4 jobs even as the City has operated irresponsibly for the past several years by not raising its approximately 10% share of our property tax bills to cover all those expenses it refuses to cut, or even increases – as it demonstrated by reacting to the current $2 million-plus deficit budget by increasing the cash the City gives away to private community organizations that have come to expect annual handouts of tax dollars to make up for what they can’t or won’t raise on their own.

Schmidt talked a good game several weeks ago when he proposed that the City adopt some form of zero-based budgeting (“ZBB”) requiring the City’s various departments to take a fresh, square-one look at: (a) what they currently do and should be doing (only, perhaps, better and more efficiently); (b) what they currently don’t do, but should be doing; and (c) what they currently do but should not be doing.  The lack of enthusiasm from a majority of the City Council and City Staff, however, combined with the departure of Finance Director Diane Lembesis, quickly turned ZBB into a “wait ‘til next year” idea, if then.

With the State of Illinois trailing only California in the race to bankruptcy, we can’t expect much in the way of financial assistance from Springfield.  To the contrary, as a community we’ll be lucky if we don’t start hearing more howling from our local schools because today’s Tribune reports that the state owes local school districts $1 billion that it cannot pay – to go along with the $775 million it owes universities and community colleges, and the $478 million it owes various municipalities.

Last May we suggested a variety of ways for the City to balance its 2009-10 budget which were ignored, leaving the $2 million+ deficit untouched.  And there was nothing in that budget for things like flood relief, O’Hare noise monitoring, and other expenditures that a number of Park Ridge residents consider vital – at least to themselves.

There are no attractive options available at this juncture, especially with a City government that has refused to even own up to its financial problems and embrace such common-sense solutions as passing through to water users 100% of the cost of the water the City purchases from Chicago, or cutting handouts to private organizations over which the taxpayers have no control.

These are precarious financial times, folks.  Unfortunately, unrealistic expectations combined with financial mismanagement over the past several years have put us in a situation that will be difficult and painful to properly resolve – even with that billboards “snake oil” Ald. Jim “Billboards” Allegretti and his colleague Frank DiFranco are trying to peddle.    

The front page story in this week’s Park Ridge Journal is titled: “The City Needs Money.”  That’s what prominent local attorney and Morningfields Market owner Frank DiFranco is howling in a blatant attempt to stampede our resident sheep – including most of the Park Ridge City Council – into a questionable billboards deal.

The kinkiness of all this should have been obvious from the start, with DiFranco law colleague (and relative?) Ald. Jim “Billboards” Allegretti not only leading the charge on the zoning code text amendments needed for the four billboards Generation Group, Inc. is seeking, but also proposing the scheme by which the City (rather than GGI or the property owner) became the “applicant” for those amendments – a scheme in which Alds. Robert Ryan and Frank Wsol were (take your pick): (a) co-schemers; (b) accomplices; (c) aiders and abettors; or (d) clueless go-along-to-get-alongs. 

Because the applicant was the City, no disclosures had to be made under the City’s ethics ordinance as to the identities of the officers, directors and shareholders of GGI or the property owner.

How convenient for them.

According to the Journal article, DiFranco wants the City to have a sit down with GGI’s Joseph Loss and talk money:  “They should be meeting with Joe Loss and trying to figure out how to get the most amount of money.”

We agree…but only after GGI and the owner of the Renaissance office plaza voluntarily provide all of the disclosures required under the ethics ordinance, so the City knows exactly who it is dealing with.  And because (according to the Journal article) DiFranco “has stated he is not connected to Loss’ Generation Group corporation,” we think DiFranco and Allegretti should present ethics disclosures too, if only as a sign of their good faith and fair dealing.  

Disclosures are crucial here because some of Mr. Loss’ clients in billboard deals with other municipalities reportedly are known criminals, like former Crook County undersheriff Jim Dvorak, who did federal time for bribery and ghost payrolling scams; and Oak Brook businessman Joseph Nicosia, convicted of insurance fraud.

In a series of articles in 2004, the Des Plaines Journal details the connections between Loss, Dvorak and Nicosia in the company that made a bundle off billboard permits granted by the City of Des Plaines, ostensibly trading on Dvorak’s relationship with Bill Schneider, who himself was convicted of mail fraud in the 1990s but nevertheless overcame that impediment to become head of Des Plaines’ Economic Development Commission and then even Acting City Manager.

Once all the appropriate disclosures have been made and the City and all of its residents have some idea of with whom they are dealing, sitting down and bargaining over how much the City deserves for four eyesores and the prospect of more makes sense.  And once the money issue is resolved – and assuming the City Attorney finds a way to ensure that any deal the City cuts on these billboards can be legally enforced – the City Council can hold a public hearing where residents can opine on whether the price is right.

Make no mistake about it, folks: the City does need money.  But, in large part, that’s because of the financial mismanagement we got for the past four years under former mayor Howard P. Frimark and his favorite aldermanic lapdog, “Billboards” Allegretti, when the City posted millions in deficit budgets, spent down fund balances, and tried to add another $16 million of debt for a new cop shop – something Allegretti favored so much he didn’t even want a referendum. 

So why weren’t DiFranco and Allegretti singing the money blues back then?

Maybe they were too busy listening to Claire de Lune?

Mayor Dave Schmidt is quoted in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Mayor vows to vote against sign proposal,” January 5) as saying he will vote “no” on the zoning code text amendment to permit billboards in Park Ridge: “As far as I’m concerned, when Planning and Zoning votes unanimously on something, that sends a pretty strong message that it’s how the community at large feels.”

In case you’ve been in a coma for the past several weeks, what Schmidt is talking about is the four billboards Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”) wants the City to approve for the Renaissance office complex at the northwest corner of Park Ridge, a request that has been aggressively advanced by Fourth Ward Ald. Jim “Billboards” Allegretti’s ever since GGI contacted him several months ago to enlist his aid in getting the City’s blessing to inflict billboard blight on our community.

There is nothing attractive about a billboard, irrespective of whatever message is splayed across it – except to the people who make a bundle on them.  But we don’t exactly know who those people are, because Allegretti got Alds. Robert Ryan and Frank Wsol to join him in voting to have the City of Park Ridge be the applicant for the zoning code text amendment needed for the billboards. 

That means neither GGI nor the owners of the Renaissance complex (who likely will be getting a nice piece of change as “rent” for providing the billboard location) had to comply with the City’s ethics ordinance, which requires applicants for things like zoning text amendments to disclose their principals, partners, shareholders, officers and directors. In other words, Allegretti, Ryan and Wsol made sure that the owners and operators of GGI and Renaissance folks got a free pass from public scrutiny on this deal.

Why doesn’t that surprise us?

Allegretti continues to try to lead the cattle drive on this billboards deal, arguing that the proposed one-time payment by GGI of $400,000 represents a windfall of 20% of the reported 2009-10 budget deficit.  But even if that payment is legal – which the City Attorney thinks it isn’t – it is still just a one-time payment, not a $400,000 annuity.  Which means that if Allegretti and his fellow alderdopes keep spending millions more than the City takes in while depleting the City’s fund balances in the process, the economic benefits of that billboard deal will be a distant memory while the billboards continue to stand guard over Park Ridge. 

That’s why it is even more suspicious that flyers promoting GGI’s billboards [pdf], and containing several factual inaccuracies, have turned up at Morningfields Market in South Park, a business owned by prominent local attorney and legal colleague of Allegretti’s, Frank DiFranco.  The flyers claim that the City is being irresponsible if it turns away the billboard money, which coincidentally is the same argument DiFranco made at the City Council’s December 21, 2009 meeting.

But where was DiFranco for the past few years when the administration of former-mayor Howard P. Frimark – with Allegretti as Frimark’s favorite lap-dog alderman – was passing all these deficit budgets that have left the City in such a precarious condition?  Where was DiFranco’s law partner, Jeff Wilson, another pro-billboard take-the-money speaker on December 21? 

Will the next Morningfields’ flyers explain those absences?

As we enter both a new year and a new decade, it’s a good time to look both backwards and forwards at not only our City government but also those other branches of government that primarily service our community, and take stock of where we came from and where we are going financially. 

The years 2000 through 2009 were characterized by spending, spending and more spending, enabled by taxing and borrowing – even though all that spending does not appear to have provided us with better quality infrastructure or services. 

For example, the City of Park Ridge pretty much neglected its sewer system for the past decade, failing to perform needed systemic inspection, maintenance and repairs – not only under Mayor Ron “Damn O’Hare!” Wietecha and the sclerotic Homeowners Party, but also under Acting-Mayor Mike Marous and the “Independents” (non-Homeowner aldermen) and even more so under Mayor Howard Frimark and his Alderpuppets.  Flood control and remediation also were ignored while new development and redevelopment actually increased flooding risks and demands on our sewer systems.

Although its academic standing generally remained stable over the decade, High School District 207 currently is trying to cope with a $17 million “structural budget deficit.”  Meanwhile, during the first part of the decade Elementary School District 64 spent itself to the brink of Illinois State Board of Education intervention [pdf] before bailing itself out with a “back-door” $5 million working-cash bond issue to make payroll in 2005 [pdf], followed by a major referendum-based tax increase in 2007 – neither of which has produced consistent, notable gains in student performance, even as the District has gone about restoring many of the $12.2 million in cuts it made while claiming they would not impair educational quality.  (So why restore them?) 

Even the Park Ridge Recreation and Park District, the smallest-budget branch of local government, continues to bungle the management of its outdoor swimming pools (which look to have booked another operating loss approaching $100,000 once the December figures are in [pdf]) and an almost $200,000 loss on the Senior Center [pdf], while still being bedeviled by the management of problematic facilities like the do-not-resuscitate Oakton Pool and the poorly-designed Community Center.

Fortunately for Park Ridge taxpayers, the schools and the Park District are non-home rule bodies whose ability to raise taxes is limited by what are known (fondly to many taxpayers) as “tax caps.”  Not so the home-rule City government, where spending is limited only by whatever sense of shame City officials can muster about their fiscal mismanagement.  And for most of the past 10 years those officials have been pretty darned shameless.

So what can we expect from these governmental bodies in 2010?

Well, District 207 is proposing to cut expenditures by $15 million and raise revenues $2 million [pdf] to fill that $17 million budget hole.  Part of those cuts will come from a freeze of administrators’ salaries and from the District 207 teachers’ voluntary salary increase give-back program, which they are exploring as an enlightened alternative to the District’s cutting of approximately 75 teacher jobs.

District 64, on the other hand, recently approved an approximately 4.9% property tax levy increase for the 2009 tax year – with only board member Russ Gentile voting “no” [pdf].  And, according to its November 10, 2009, press release [pdf], the District is already starting to waffle on its pre-2007 referendum 10-year financial projections, despite amassing very healthy budget surpluses these last two years.  But what should we expect when the District’s School Board and Administration just gave the teachers’ union members annual raises of approximately 4.5% (including step increases) over the next three years, even though (as the press release acknowledges) the Consumer Price Index increase in 2008 “was just 0.1%”? 

And if what was included in the Park Board’s December meeting package is any indication, the Park District looks to be predicting its own budget deficit of between $800,000 and $1.1 million [pdf], depending on which of two revenue projections is ultimately adopted by the Park Board later this month.  It also appears that $300,000+ of that deficit can once again be attributed to Oakton Pool and the Senior Center, thereby providing further proof of the correctness of Einstein’s definition of insanity.

And the City?  At this point in time, it looks like Mayor Schmidt’s plan for some form of zero-based budgeting is a pipe dream – what with City Mgr. Jim Hock loudly objecting, City Finance Director Diane Lembesis on her way to Gurnee, and the Council majority of deficit-wallowing Alderpuppets installed by former mayor Frimark seemingly incapable of performing subtraction when it comes to City expenditures.

Last May we provided our own simple way to almost balance the City budget (“How To Balance The City Budget,” May 27, 2009) – we came up $49,700 short on the $2 million, which we left for self-proclaimed budget “hawk” Ald. Don Bach (3rd Ward) to take care of.  Fortunately, we didn’t hold our breath for that to occur.    

Which sets the table for Fourth Ward Ald. Jim Allegretti and his Council cronies to push through the highly-questionable Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”) billboard deal as $400,000 of “found money” that the City would be foolish to turn down – notwithstanding the City Attorney’s preliminary opinion that such an “impact fee” might not be legally enforceable or even constitutional, and despite the whole Allegretti-engineered, City-as-applicant arrangement stinking up the entire Council chambers.

One thing does look pretty certain, however: the taxpayers likely will take a trimming from every branch of local government, to go with the ones they will take from the State of Illinois and Crook County; and that trimming will likely be accompanied by reduced services from most, if not all, branches of local government.

So Happy New Year…and welcome to the 2010 edition of fiscally mismanaged local governments gone wild.

As another year comes to a close, we here at PublicWatchdog hope that we have helped make local government more transparent, understandable and accountable to the taxpayers who fund it; and that we also have helped shine a spotlight on those who would abuse the public trust of government, or manipulate it for their own benefit to the detriment of the community as a whole.  We also promise to try to do even better in 2010.

In that spirit, we offer the following quotes:

“But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.  It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government.”
            Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
            Edmund Burke

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary”
            James Madison, Federalist No. 51

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government”
            Thomas Jefferson

“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush.  It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”
            Robert Maynard Hutchins

And with that, we wish all of you a happy, vigilant, active, passionate, engaged and well-nourished New Year.